100,000 Hits, Olympic Games and OOW (Golden Years) August 26, 2008

It doesn’t seem that long ago when I was celebrating 10,000 hits. Well over the last day or so, I’ve hit the next significant milestone, 100,000 hits. Considering the somewhat limited appeal of my humble writings (Oracle Indexes doesn’t generally generate the same interest as say Madonna’s new world tour or the world’s best apple pie recipe), it’s a nice little number to reach nonetheless. So a big thank-you to everyone who has contributed over the past 8 months or so and I hope some of those 100,000 hits were worth the effort.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been stuck in front of the TV watching the spectacle that is the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games. I’m an Olympic Games tragic and just love watching the best athletes in the world compete and amaze us with their talents while of course watching Australia win medals. One of the happiest and most exciting periods of life was during the whole Sydney 2000 Olympics experience and for example being there poolside as Ian Thorpe won the 400M freestyle gold medal. Magical times indeed.

For the BeiJing 2008 Olympics, my highlights and lowlights were:

Australian Highlight: Toss up between Sally McLennan’s celebration when she won silver in the 100M hurdles and Matthew Mitcham’s amazing last dive to take gold in the 10M platform. To finish 6th overall was another impressive performance for a country of only 20 odd million although beating the poms in 2012 must surely be a national priority :)

Overall Highlight: Michael Phelps winning 8 gold medals was an incredible achievement that will likely never been repeated but for me the highlight was the performance of Usain Bolt who managed to crush the best in the world and beat world records while playing with the crowd. He would be booked for speeding if he ran that fast in a school zone !!

Biggest Disappointment: The TV coverage dished out by Channel 7 in Australia, it was simply appalling. Featuring more ads than actual coverage, what coverage we had was often delayed and featured repeat after repeat after repeat of the same things. Many sports were simply not shown, including many blue ribbon events like many of the athletic field events. SBS, a second TV station with secondary rights managed to salvage some respectability with their coverage but overall, it was a huge disappointment. Thankfully, Channel 7 no longer have the TV rights for the Olympics, hopefully lessons have been learnt and things will improve in time for London 2012.

I’ve had a number of emails regarding where the hell I’m listed for this year’s Oracle OpenWorld schedule after my presentation was one of the winners in the Oracle Mix “competition”. Firstly a big thank-you to everyone who voted, my “Indexing Secrets” presentation ended up finishing 6th and was selected. Unfortunately, times are somewhat tight at work and I wasn’t able to get my travel costs approved and so will not be able to attend OOW this year. Sorry to all those who were hoping to see me action, maybe next year.

Finally, in the next day or two, I’ll finally get around to answering Brian Tkatch’s question on when partitioning is a better option than just an index. So stayed tuned !!

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Bummer you won’t make it to OOW, for you and for us that were hoping to see you there. Hopefully, with the entire Oracle community at the conference (minus you), it’ll be a quiet week at work for you :).

I too was glued to the coverage of the Olympics, albeit mostly highlights apart from the evening events (much as I love the Olympics, there was no way I was going to get up at 2am to watch the live coverage!!). Thankfully, we had a feed set up at work that allowed us to have it running on our PC’s, which was handy.

It’s a shame that the coverage you guys had was poor; in comparison, I thought the BBC’s coverage was *FABULOUS* and the commentators were enthusiastic (amusingly so at time!) and really kept the interest up! I even learned a bit more about how the velodrome cycling works! I can’t wait for the Paralympics to start; I’m having withdrawal symptoms!!

Too right about Channel 7 – that obsession about “no aussie competitor, therefore no coverage” gave me the s…ts. Bloody hell – the women’s pole vault – bloomin’ world record and 8 seconds of coverage….

Luckily being a volleyball fan, SBS did a top job by me.

I can also recommend Beyonwiz products – twin hi def tuner recorded every single hour of coverage on both 7 and SBS – all then edited to get rid of commercials, sandy roberts and the like…sits nicely on around 2TB :-)

The field events are just mandatory viewing in any Olympics, except unfortunately in Australia where there’s a 2 minute summary or simply not shown at all. Unless an Aussie wins gold of course in which case it’s repeated 10 times.